Three Decades with a Hill

The story of a girl and the sorrow that rocks her family in the first thirty years of her life — from Ifeanyi Kalu

Akunna’s house was almost at the foot of the hill at the extreme end of Eni Njoku Avenue in the University campus. On one of those days while still in primary school she sat beside Brother Uche who was driving her home and looking wistfully at people going about their business she asked. “Brother Uche why do we live in that street? It’s too lonely. You hardly see someone walking across the road.”

“Ask your father when we get home. I am sure he will tell you the same thing he has told me severally.”

And yes, when she asked her father at home that day, he blew out those words just the way Brother Uche had said them while mimicking him back in the car.

“I did not choose the place — the university allotted the house to me and fortunately it is very serene.”

It was this serenity that Akunna detested. The street was too quiet and lonely for her liking. It was unlike the other ones she had come to know, Fulton Avenue, Maguerite Cartwright, Ziks Drive, Elias Avenue and even Okuta Close, they always bustled with life unlike Eni Njoku. Her father liked it. He said it was a perfect environment for academics. In his words “serenity stimulates research.” Brother Uche detested the serenity too and he always spent much time away from home. The only reason Akunna did not detest the street entirely was because of one thing. Just one thing. The hill. The Vet Hill. It stood some yards behind the Veterinary Medicine faculty explaining while people called it Vet Hill. It was two houses away from Akunna’s house. Covered with a lush green field the hill had some stories that came with it. One of such stories was the 1967 miracle. The civil war had just started and the Nigerian troops at the time had entered the university campus and those who were living in Eni Njoku Avenue who had failed to vacate the campus early enough before the coming of the troops decided to move up the hill and hide. So, they moved up the hill and hid behind the reservoir on the hilltop and from there they watched on. The army arrived the street few minutes later and seeing that the houses were empty just like the other houses in the other streets in the campus they made a move to climb the hill. The first column of five soldiers who climbed halfway up the hill tumbled down with their heads broken. Seeing this their commanding officer ordered the entire troops to quit the climbing and move out of the street. After they had left, the families who had gone up the hill to hide climbed down and left the campus through another route. Some said the story was a fallacy, others said it happened. Her father was not certain whether it was a fallacy or a fact.

“It might have happened but I’m not sure it happened.” He had told Akunna when she asked him.

Before she asked him that question about the authenticity of the story she would always come out on the street and stand in front of their compound every evening watching the hill as it stood in its glory. She derived so much pleasure doing that. But at nine years old when her father was unable to answer to her satisfaction the question she had asked she started climbing the hill every evening. And once she was at the hilltop, she would ask the hill the question her father couldn’t do justice to.

“Hill is it true that in 1967 you saved those families that came to you for safety?” One evening after she had asked that question a strong wind came and it slurred the grass on the hill and her instinct told her she had been answered and she could even sense the hill telling her,

“Yes, I saved those people, I broke the heads of those soldiers to protect those people.”

From that evening Akunna became more relaxed with the hill. She would stay on the hill every evening and watch the farm ridges planted in straight alignment at the foot of the hill. Then she would sit on a flat stone and look up to the sky and shut her eyes against the bright orange setting sun and imagine that her mother was alive and that there was no need for the presence of Aunty Mimi in the house and that Brother Uche was not always away from home. Every evening she walked down the hill and walked into her house, the imagination would fly like a bird back to the hill where it was formed and where it belonged. Those things she never wanted was always there in the house starring at her face — her mother’s absence, Aunty Mimi’s presence and Brother Uche’s distant lifestyle. These were the realities that chased away her imaginations. Brother Uche was eight years older than her. Her mother had once told her, “If he sends you on any errand, you must do it willingly. He is eight years older than you and he is your father’s only son. Okpara nna gi ka owu¹.”

She always respected him even before her mother had told her to do so, even when she found out that he smokes cigarettes, even when she found out that there was another type of smoke that exudes from his room which had a smell that was very different and stronger than the smell of the smoke of a cigarette. She always respected him, not just because he was the older one and her only sibling but because he was very intelligent. At seventeen Brother Uche was studying Geology with a scholarship he earned by graduating on top of his class in the University’s Secondary School. Their mother died of cancer while she was four and one year after that Aunty Mimi married her father. Brother Uche never forgave their father for that.

“One year is not enough for you to mourn a woman who gave you two children, a woman you claim you loved.” He told their father a week after the court marriage.

The next day he moved into their boys’ quarter and with that began his seclusion from home. Even though he came into the main house often he never stayed more than five minutes before heading back to the Boys Quarters with whatever he came to collect. Apart from the short greetings he muttered to Aunty Mimi and the short responses that solidified the friction between them that she muttered back to him there were no conversation between them. At that time Akunna always heard her father at night soothing Aunty Mimi in their bedroom saying,

“Don’t worry he will outgrow it, he will change.”

Up to the time when Akunna started climbing the hill the frictions between Brother Uche and Aunty Mimi was still fresh like Tatashi² — the red pepper her mother used to buy in Nsukka’s Ogige market³. Aunty Mimi was good yet she was a misfit. She was like a new sparkling pair of shoes with the wrong size — no matter how hard one tried it never got to fit one’s legs. Aunty Mimi was a graduate assistant in Political Science department where Akunna’s father was the HOD. She had been his student as an undergraduate and then as a postgraduate and when Akunna’s mother died she had been the one who consoled him the most, that was how she ended up marrying him. Among the photographs hanging on the walls of their living room was the one they took a year after the court wedding in the lawn that sits close to the university main gate, the one that has a molded black lion standing on its two legs with its mouth open, revealing its red tongue. Whenever she was inside the house, Akunna would look at the photograph and see Aunty Mimi sharing a smile with her father and Brother Uche standing stone faced beside her and the black lion standing with vigour behind them. But when she climbed the hill in the evening and closed her eyes against the orange setting sun, she would see the photograph and sharing a smile with their father in the family picture was their mother not Aunty Mimi, and Brother Uche’s face was engulfed in the same smile as he stood beside her with the lion standing as a covering over them. At thirteen tedium had become a part of their house just the way the walls of the building were a part of the house, to get rid of it was to destroy the entire house. So, any time she was not on the hill or at the children centre library she would sit at home with her father and Aunty Mimi and endure the boredom. The duo would sit together watching BBC News and discussing at the same time divergent political issues — how Thomas Sankara, a visionary African leader was assassinated in Burkina Faso four years ago on the orders of Blaise Compaore a puppet of France and IMF, how Babangida had ignored the Nigerian people’s voice and had gone ahead to implement the Structural Adjustment Programme that devalued the Nigerian currency, how Mandela was rewriting the course of African history by not witch hunting the whites of South Africa and so on. Her father was not just a Professor of Political Science but was also a political and human rights activist who was fighting the repressive military regime in Nigeria. This was one of those shared areas of interest between him and Aunty Mimi that bond both of them together. Brother Uche was already distant at that time and her father’s involvement in political and human rights activism that kept him in meetings away from home some of the times did not help bridge this distance. The few hours Brother Uche spent at home was burnt on weed that came with a strong scent that always made its way into the main house and on university girls who he walked down the street at dawn after nights of abominable pleasures and on American hiphop blasting out from his compact disc. It was from his compact disc that Akunna heard the voices of Biggie Smalls and 2Pac for the first time. Their songs had become a bonding anthem for young boys in the University who were gangsters or gangster wannabes wearing Jeans and Tshirts that always had one line of verse from Biggie Smalls’ and 2Pac’s songs written on them. Biggie Small’s “No. No. No. Notorious. We are. We are. No. No. No. Notorious. He is. He is. No. No. No. Notorious” and 2Pac’s “Dear Mama” was always on Brother Uche’s lips and blaring out loud from his CD. Their father never protested Brother Uche’s misdemeanor, not because the weed he smoked did not make him act stupidly like it did to the gangster boys off campus, not because he still did those things that suggests respect for a father like washing his cars and polishing his shoes without being told, but because he knew that his marriage to Aunty Mimi had left a wound in Brother Uche’s life. And to protest what he was doing meant reopening the wound. One afternoon Akunna went to Brother Uche’s room in the Boys’ Quarter to serve him his lunch as was her custom — a custom she had developed because of her respect for him and not because he demanded it — and right there in the middle of his room she saw Brother Uche lying in the pool of his own blood with fresh blood still oozing out from the side of his arm where he was given a jagged cut. She let out a loud scream and let the tray of food nose dive to the floor spilling the Jollof rice and fried plantain on the thick red rug. She dashed out and called Aunty Mimi and her father who all ran hurriedly behind her to the Boys Quarter. Tupac’s “Dear Mama” was still playing loudly on the Compact Disc while they wailed and struggled with his body as they tried with all vigour to call him back to life. Later they found out from the Police report that he was shot twice on a close range on the stomach and macheted on the right arm. The police told them that Brother Uche was a victim of a gang war he was involved in being himself a member of one of the warring gangs. Brother Uche’s death drew in a lot of mourners to their house. Once again Eni Njoku Avenue looked alive like it did when her mother died. Akunna at that time believed the street was wicked and cursed if not it wouldn’t be coming alive only when someone died and lots of people had to troop in to cry their hearts out and say “sorry” and “nduo⁴” endlessly for hours. Cars swarm in and out of their residence, honking so loudly while moving in and out. For more than one-week vehicles parked from inside their residence to the main road on the street stretching out to the tail end of the street where a junction connected it to another street. The mourners all said something about the “rascals and vandals from town.”

“Those devilish rascals from town. God will surely punish those boys”. “Unclean children of evil parents robbing everywhere in town, they are only fit to be vandals”. “Barbaric elements, they will leave town and come into the campus to wreak havoc”. “Those vandals from the womb, may their evil fall upon them”. “Those cursed rascals will not escape this one, the consequence of this evil will hunt them till it catches up with them”.

Her father would nod at these words giving affirmation to them but deep down inside him he knew the crux of the matter wasn’t about the rascals and vandals from town, he knew that he was the one who drove his only son away and into gangsterism and all sorts of youthful vice when he remarried shortly after his wife, Brother Uche’s mother died. He should have waited a little longer and let the boy get over his mother’s demise before making Mimi his wife but he didn’t and the result of his decision was right in his face — the brutal death of his own son. His son who was very promising. His son who had made all “As” in his WAEC exam and secured a Shell scholarship for his entire undergraduate studies. His son who despite his tensions with him still voluntarily did his laundry, washed his cars, polished his shoes and bought him flowers and a native kaftan up and down dress on Father’s Day. His son had gone to his early grave because of him. His son’s death was on him. He knew that. On the hill after Brother Uche’s burial, Akunna would face the orange setting sun and cry out her heart. She would see Brother Uche again and again every time she closed her eyes against the orange setting sun and then she would wish the grave diggers in their hometown had covered her up in his grave when she jumped in and landed on his mahogany casket. The grave diggers had jumped in too and tiresomely pulled her out while she wailed and dragged to stay back. She still heard the loud sound of earth and stones pouring into the grave and hitting hard against the casket as the grave diggers covered up Brother Uche’s grave.

When Akunna turned seventeen she passed WAEC and JAMB and secured an admission into the University’s History Department and then she met Chike the boy in her class who lived with his parents in town and came to lectures from home unlike the other boys in her class. Chike was chirpy and sturdy. He spoke Igbo with an Onitsha accent that substituted “r” with “l” and said “Ka anyi lie nli⁵” when he should have said “Ka anyi rie nri”, “let us eat”.

He carried with him this joy that was inexplicably contagious, and he did difficult things with so much ease. Any time Akunna’s face grew morose he would look at her and say “Ke ife owu⁶? What is it? Biko lighten up your face joor⁷.” And then the urge to laugh will engulf her. Any time he spoke Igbo the entire class stopped to listen because he was the only Igbo in the class with that Onitsha accent. An accent he had learnt by default within the four walls of his home in Nsukka and not in Onitsha. His parents were Onitsha Igbos who had settled in Nsukka in the early 80s. Before the end of their second semester everyone in the class already knew that Chike was the class best student with the highest CPGA in the whole faculty for that session. Akunna went regularly to the library with him and to his home off-campus where she saw his parents and two sisters and the photograph of an older brother who was studying abroad. It was in his home that she discovered where all that joy came from. Happiness was all that mattered in that house in Odenigbo⁸, Nsukka, and it was really what one could call a home. The way joy circulated there it was like water flowing from a broken pipe. A ceaseless, never-ending outpour. Something Akunna had never seen before. She wished she was born into that family. They did not have so much of the so-called things that gave life a meaning yet the good cheer amongst them was so palpable. Even when the strong hands of anger rose up within them it couldn’t loosen the gordian knot that tied them to that joy. There was no tension there, no pensive moods, no frictions, just joy. It was there she ate boiled cocoyam with ifendoli⁹— a sauce of fried palm oil and ugba¹⁰ — for the first time. It was there she ate like never before mangoes that had the shape of an apostrophe with backs that were as green as unripe papayas yet their inside shone a bright yellow like the yellow on the orange setting sun she saw on the hill. It was there she learned how to play charade — the game of acting and guessing. It was there she saw in practical terms people thinking about the effect their actions would have on others before taking them. That was something her father failed to do when he went ahead and married Aunty Mimi one year after her mother’s death. She really wanted to be a part of that family. Somewhere inside her she was sure she was going to become a member of that family — she was sure that this thing that took her from the university campus to Chike’s house in town to spend time with him and his family would go beyond the platonic relationship they had to something deeper. She was sure they were going to get married after school and then she would finally become a member of that family, having what they had and living their kind of life. A life where joy was everything and everyone’s happiness mattered the most. Before the end of the first semester of their second year the university went on strike. The military government had refused to pay the lecturers for two months and the latter shut down academic activities in the university. With the strike raging on for months and the university campus looking like a ghost town created by people fleeing a war Chike decided he was going to travel down to Asaba and help his uncle with his trade. The day before he travelled to Asaba she went with him and his two sisters to the hill and they all joked about the coincidence that Chike was going to see the River Niger for the first time just like Chike in Chinua Achebe’s Chike and the River. But unlike Achebe’s Chike, Chike never saw the river because their bus crashed in Onitsha before getting to the Niger bridge. The day his sisters told Akunna that he had died she ran from St. Peter’s Chaplaincy to the hill with Chike’s sisters running after her. She cried more than she did when her mother and Brother Uche died. She cried till her eyelids got swollen and her eyes glowed red like she had caught Nigerian Apollo — Conjunctivitis. As she sat on the hill that evening, she did not close her eyes against the orange setting sun because her eyelids had grown heavy, rather she watched the sun till it disappeared and with that she knew she would never be the same again. Her joy, her new found joy that was her only escape route from the world of anguish that she had come to know had just been snatched away from her. Just like that. Things will never be the same again. She knew that. When the strike ended and life returned back to the campus her faculty organized a one-hour procession for Chike and they all wore black and black and walked round the university campus singing dirges and wielding leafy tree branches pausing sometimes to hit the branches on the ground as if they were flogging the earth for snatching away their colleague. After Chike’s burial Akunna reclined into herself. Not that she stayed away from people and activities and cut herself off from the world but there was a certain loss of zeal for life that pushed the real her into the inside of herself. It was like a snail having its shell out there for everyone to see but the real snail itself was somewhere inside locked up in its shell where no one could access it without giving it a breaking. Where Akunna was at that time was a place where no one around her could afford to give her that breaking. Her father and Aunty Mimi couldn’t do much to get her to come around, they were still aware of how touchy their relationship with her was especially with the death of Brother Uche, they knew things could get worse if they tried to push her. At that time, she did things from the surface level, there was no soul in the things she did, no depth at all. Even her studies began to take a downward flight. Her CGPA had climbed to a high point in her first year stopping only two places below Chike’s own, a 4.7, Chike’s own was a 4.9. Her father had praised her then saying she was going to make a good scholar, a professor of History. That was all thanks to Chike who demystified reading for her and made the university’s library their most visited location second only to his home in town. But after his burial her CGPA crashed to a low average. A 3.0. She would go to the library, sit down to read and doze off, some other times she would get to the front of the building, stare at the library from its roof to the very last step in the staircase that led into the building and she would turn and walk back to her house. And of course in her house she would loathe everything, the chain fence that looked like it locked her down in a place she did not want to be, the mango tree that bore fruits that always spoilt in the air before they were plucked like they were some evil children cursed from the womb, the ixora flower that looked unattractive whenever their nectar was not being sucked by butterflies, the green walls of the European styled bungalow that were painted a dull green — the colour of Nigeria — at the sheer insistence of her father because of his love for Nigeria and political activism, the fact that her father and Aunty Mimi watched European and American news channels like their lives depended on it, the European and American news channels where white journalists talked too much of African politics and interviewed MKO Abiola and General Sani Abacha passionately like Nigeria was now their country, like they were no longer Europeans and Americans free and far away from the continent of power mongers called Africa. She loathed everything in that house. She would lock herself up in her room and wait for the evening to come when the light of the sun was no longer harsh but smooth on the skin and then she would climb the hill, sit in front of the orange setting sun and reminisce her time with Chike and she would cry.

That was 1995 the year she turned eighteen. Aunty Mimi began to teach her how to drive that year. “Nne¹¹ you are eighteen now and under Nigerian law you are eligible to drive. So, you will start driving so you can help out with the errands to town.” She said on their way to the cricket pitch at Franco behind the university stadium.

After weeks of driving round the cricket pitch at Franco with Aunty Mimi sitting beside her and dishing out the instructions, she started driving on main roads with the L sign tied behind the boot. Before the year ended, she became a pro, driving regularly to Nsukka’s Ogige market to buy foodstuff daily. At the market she understood why Aunty Mimi had hurriedly taught her how to drive. The women in the market who were mostly Catholics and who belong the CWO arm of St. Peter’s Chaplaincy which her mother once chaired stared at her as she walked past their line and in whispers they said “that is the Professor’s daughter, the step daughter of that witch. That witch that killed the Professor’s wife and married him. She no longer comes to the market rather she sends her step daughter so she can avoid our rebuke, so she won’t see us flick our fingers and say tufiakwa¹²! Thank God, the spirit of the girl’s mother has not allowed her to bear children.”

It was after hearing these words that she realized that she was wrong thinking that her father was not the one who taught her how to drive because he was busy with his human rights activism against military rule and academic work in school. She realized that Aunty Mimi was running away from the humiliation those women in the market gave her every time she went there to shop. That was why she hurriedly taught her how to drive even when she would have waited for her father to give her the driving lessons later in the year. Akunna somehow felt bad for her especially because the humiliation had to do with not just the accusation of being a witch but also the taunting mockery of being barren. Aunty Mimi had not conceived once or given birth to a child ever since she married her father and people making mockery of that was one thing Akunna did not support. However, that still did not change much in her relationship with Aunty Mimi, it did not open her up to her the way it should be between a mother and a daughter. She had always maintained a non-hostile relation with her from the early days of her marriage to her father but there was that line she knew she would not let her politeness towards her cross. It was a door she would never open to her because she wasn’t her mother. It was at this time that the hill was made motorable through the other side that one could not see while watching the hill from Akunna’s street. She began driving up the hill and one day she took Chike’s sisters with her and drove up the hill. That day on the hill she saw the radiance in the girls’ eyes and words, something she thought would have been stifled by Chike’s death. When they laughed and giggled and the necklaces bearing small pictures of Chike dangled on their chest, she saw how true it was that anger and pain had nothing on them and she longed to be like them. She wanted a light heart to undress the cloth of pain that years had put on her. Sometimes she felt light a little but once she drove into her premises and turned off the ignition that lightness leaves her and walks away like a spirit leaving a human body it had lived in for years, so she would watch that happiness stray away defeated by the dysphoria in the place that life had forced her to call home. At some point she was no longer sure she derived any pleasure again in climbing the hill especially after she started seeing dark clouds gather around the background behind Brother Uche in their family picture that she saw in her mind anytime she was on the hill watching the orange setting sun. By the time she graduated and had finished her one-year compulsory national youth service she had completely lost the desire to climb the hill. That was when Aunty Mimi divorced her father. It was 1997 two years before Nigeria would return to a democratic rule. The frustration of bareness and the stigma of marrying a widower and the much deeper stigma of being accused of killing her husband’s late wife with witchcraft had forced Aunty Mimi out of the marriage. She heard people accuse her over and over again of killing Akunna’s mother and she heard people say that the woman had blocked her womb from conceiving and bearing children so she would not know the joys of motherhood. Those words ate into her soul the way termites eat into woods. When she could not take it any longer, she filed for a divorce and left Nigeria. She left for the United States where she had secured a fellowship in Arizona University and with that her page in Akunna’s life was closed. They never spoke again after she left. Her leaving came as a surprise to Akunna. She had become used to the idea of Aunty Mimi being her father’s wife and had adjusted her life to accommodate that reality just the same way she had accommodated so many awful realities in her life so she never dreamed that one day Aunty Mimi would wake up and walk away from that marriage no matter what the challenge was. But then it happened and she had to live with that reality too, at least this one was not a big deal for her, it was not a big deal for her because she didn’t miss her. She didn’t miss her because she was not her mother. She was not Brother Uche. She was not Chike. She was Aunty Mimi, the lady her father married just a year after her mother died.

Akunna graduated with a second-class lower division much to the chagrin of her father who had expected her to graduate with a first class or at least a second class upper so she would get herself a lecturing position in the university just like himself. His disappointment notwithstanding her father used his standing and influence in the university community to ensure she secured an administrative position in the Student Affairs Department as an administrative officer. For seven years she sat behind the desk and attended to undergraduates in an office where there was more space for old brown files than for her and her clients. At the office she exceeded the working hours. While others hurried home at the close of work, she sat back in her revolving arm chair and went through piles of files surfing through them every now and then and stacking them up on her desk and on the shelf. The job was not exactly what one could call tedious but she somehow made it tedious for herself so she can use it and avoid home. She preferred being stuck with work than having leisure at home. Home had become very desolate for her. It was just her and her father who for most of the time was off to a human rights meeting or teaching passionately his political economy class in Political Science. The house was just hollow, even with her now being the one in control of the television channels and seeing new and exciting Nigerian soap operas on NTA — soap operas like Super Story, Papa Ajasco¹³, Fuji House of Commotion, Izozo¹⁴ and Everyday People that had replaced her childhood Icheoku¹⁵, New Masquerade, Village Headmaster, Tales by Moonlight and Check Mate — she still felt an emptiness in that house she called home. So, most of the time she stayed back at work, staying up so late that she could see the question of whether she did not have a home in the eyes of the security men that locked the gate of the department after her car every night she drove home. The only time she stayed at home so much was that month in 1998 when her father was arrested by the military government. A lot of arrests were made that year and the previous year. General Sani Abacha was clamping down heavily on everyone who voiced support for Abiola’s release from prison and inauguration as duly elected civilian president. It was that month that she knew how much she still loved her father despite all that had happened. She would stay up all nights praying the five decades and the novena with her chaplet — the first time she had ever prayed since Brother Uche died — praying for her father’s release and that the soldiers will not torture him the way they did to some other detainees. The soldiers drove into their premises at night destroying the gate of the chain fence with the speed of their jalopy looking jaguar SUV waking the two of them up in the process. Before they led his father away, he had the chance to flee through the back door that led to the Boys Quarters where there was an opening in the chain fence — an opening that was made with pliers by the gangsters who killed Brother Uche, but her father would not accept the idea of running away like that because as far as he was concerned, he was not and would never be a fugitive in his fatherland. She watched those stern-faced soldiers lead her father away and for a minute she thought she would never see him again, that he would become the fourth person in her long list of loved ones she had lost. That night, she bravely trailed behind the soldiers’ SUV with her Peugeot 504 until it stopped in front of the university’s security department and she saw the soldiers lead her father into the building where he was to be detained, that sight and the knowledge that they did not take her father far away but chose to keep him within the university gave her a sigh of relief. Somehow it erased that thought of losing him, at least they did not take him to a military detention center where the height of cruelty was meted out to detainees and the hope of a release was not guaranteed, instead, they kept him inside the university where she could easily access him. The security department was just opposite the faculty she graduated from which wasn’t far from her place of work. It would be very easy for her to take a short drive or even a walk down there to see him during her breaks and after her working hours. But when she went the next day and saw the university security officers who told her that her father had been moved that morning to 82 Division of the Nigerian Military in Enugu the state capital her heart skipped and her legs felt wobbly. That thought of losing him, that thought of never seeing him again came back. This time it was overwhelming. Her father was her only surviving family and she knew what that meant. The fear that came with that thought drove her to pray. She took permission that morning at work and drove home. Finding the chaplet her mother gave her hanging on the wall she took it and began pacing around the entire room reciting the rosary. The big balls of the chaplet felt strange in her hands, she had not touched it since the year Brother Uche was shot, but she didn’t mind, she had to pray. She did not want to do the prayers at St Peter’s Chaplaincy so the Reverend Father will not dig into her with questions she was sure he knew she did not want to answer. She did the rosary and the novenas for hours every day and drove to Enugu three times every week to go see her father carrying with her his favourite meal of Jollof Rice with fried fish and plantain and sliced Moi-Moi that she had taken time to prepare. At 82 Division she found out there were two detention centres. One was for detainees accused of inciting civilian unrest, protest and demonstrations while the other was for detainees accused of coup plotting. The detainees in the second detention centre were the ones who were tortured. Some of them died there under the heat of the torture. Her father was in the first detention centre. And she thanked God for that. But by the time the month went half way and there was no sign of his release she became frustrated with the prayers. She was sure the prayers were not working and that broke her in many ways. Most times she would lie in the middle of the sitting room and cry out her heart. Things went worse when in Enugu her father told her that the soldiers were using scissors and pliers, hot electric iron and boilers on the detainees in the second detention centre and that nobody in both detention centres slept at night when those torturing sessions happened because the wailing voice of the tortured detainees were too unbearable for anyone who had conscience to accommodate. And just two days after her father told her that, she found out that her father’s cell mate, a Professor from another University in a neighbouring state was no longer there in the detention centre. She joyously thought he had been released and that there was hope for her father’s release too. But her father told her the Professor had been taken into the second detention centre. The fact that she noticed the very palpable fear in her father’s voice when he talked about the transfer of his cell mate to the second detention camp made her jittery. Her father who did not fear anyone or anything, her father who used to openly oppose some university administration policies and walk into the Vice Chancellors’ office without booking an appointment, her father who had the chance to run away and evade arrest that night the soldiers came for him but refused to run away, her father was now scared, scared to his bones. As she drove back to Nsukka that evening goose bumps grew on her arms. She was so scared of what could happen. Mid-way into the journey she parked her Peugeot 504 along the milking hill highway that connected Enugu to Nsukka, held the starring wheels hard to see if the growing goose bumps on her arms would die off and when they refused to go away, she let out a loud long scream, a loud long scream that was followed by her tears and soft sobs. It was with those teary eyes and mascara smeared face that she drove into her compound that day and bumped into the young undergraduate lady who offered to pray with her after she found out how badly her father’s case had turned out. She was the undergraduate who rented the room in their boy’s quarter where Brother Uche used to stay. After two days of prayers done in the lady’s room the entire nation woke up to hear that General Abacha had died mysteriously, dying unexpectedly in his sleep. Two weeks later a lot of political prisoners were released. Her father was one of them. His release brought a lot of relief to her. He was now out of harms’ way and she did not have to worry about him being tortured to death again. But even with the excitement and relief that came with her father’s release it did not take her more than two weeks to become tiringly familiar and used to her father again after his return. Life went back to the usual after the well-wishers who came to pay goodwill visits left the house. Human rights activism and Political Science lectures drew her father away from home again and she in turned faced her job at the Students Affairs Department working so hard that she clinched the best staff award for three years in a roll. Yet she still felt that hollow, that emptiness inside her. At this point the hill seemed dead to her just like the other persons in her life that had died. She took no pleasure anymore in climbing up the hill and sitting there to watch the orange setting sun. The hill had unexpectedly grown into something banal, unattractive and undesirable to her. And the recent stories she heard of gangs conducting gruesome initiations that left ill-fated boys lying dead on the hill did more to ruin the thing she had for the hill. Every time she drove in and out her house she kept her eyes firmly away from the hill, looking straight into the road until the car got to the far end corner of the street. This was when she started writing. Just like her work she wrote to escape her world. She would write and read and write some more until she was literally living in the world she created for self and her characters. A world where everything was all joy, nothing else but joy. She hated tragedies. She wrote nothing about her life, nothing about her story, she never told her story, she only told other people’s stories, stories that she so much desired to be her story but never was her story, stories of her mother not dying of cancer but living to become the wife of a university professor who later became first lady of her country after she and her husband succeeded in fighting off a repressive military regime and wining general elections when democracy was restored, stories of Brother Uche being a very hardworking student that graduated with a first class in Geology and a doctorate from Harvard at the age of twenty-two, stories of Chike becoming a young professor of History who became the Dean of his faculty at twenty eight and married a fellow young professor of History, a certain Akunna who had been his heart throb for years. She lived with these characters until she felt completely distant from this world. The only thing that drew her back to reality was the young boys and girls at SUB — the student union building — who danced and worshiped like nothing else mattered in the world. They were a student fellowship that used SUB for their weekly activities. She bumped into them the day she decided to have her late lunch in a new place, a restaurant different from Home Pride and Coca Cola Villa where she and Chike had had several dates. So, she drove from work to SUB where a new restaurant had opened in one of the alternate halls in the building. From the time she walked into that building to the time she finished her meal in that restaurant she kept on hearing a ceaseless barrage of melodies of soft and smooth sailing songs that oozed out from the main event hall of SUB. So, after eating she decided she was going to see the people drawing her attention like that. When she got to the threshold of the hall and peeped, she saw young people tossing hands to the sky, kneeling to the ground, squatting to bow heads and prostrate in awe as they sang with charisma while the instrumentalists played. Akunna could not explain the force that pulled her beyond the threshold, led her right into that hall and sat her down there in the middle of a worship service of a student fellowship that was in clear terms a church for undergraduates. Church was one of the routine boring things she did. She attended masses at St Peters’ Chaplaincy just for attendance’s sake and nothing more. She was never interested in the Reverend Father’s sermon or the rosary prayers. As far as she was concerned the idea of church as something that was fun died years back when her mother died. Yet she sat right there, glued to her seat and soaked in all the worship, word and energy that flowed there until she was identified as a first timer and given a grand welcome that came with lots of hugs, handshakes and snacks in a corner of the hall. It was there Akunna found out that the undergraduate tenant that prayed with her during her father’s detention was a member of the fellowship. She was the first to give her a wide warm hug that day. The lady was now in her final year and was one of the leaders in the fellowship. The fellowship was a Pentecostal group founded in the earlier eighties in the University by an undergraduate pastor who was now in Lagos where the fellowship had transformed into a big and fast-growing church. After that evening, she started frequenting the fellowship every Wednesday and Sunday evening. That force she could not explain that pulled her into the hall that evening kept her coming back again and again for a time of refreshing. From that day onwards Akunna’s life developed a triangle that repeatedly moved her around three things — writing, fellowship, work. Even after she relocated to Lagos in 2008 where she became a well-paid screenwriter for a popular filmmaker that made one of her childhood best soap operas those three things remained constantly solid in her life. Now she did writing as work and for fun, and when she was done, she would do church. She found the church the student fellowship back in Nsukka had turned into in Lagos, it had the same joy and fervency she saw in the fellowship and again like in Nsukka this glued her to the church. The day she left Nsukka her father who initially was skeptical about her resignation of her administrative role in the university for a writing job that did not give her any form of job security in far-away Lagos was the one who drove her to the bus terminal in town. While they drove away from home Akunna tried to look at the hill to see if there could ever be a connection between them again but all she saw after going three decades with the hill was brown dry overgrown grass bending to the fierce wind of the January Nigerian harmattan.

1. Okpara nna gi ka owu — He is the first son of your father.

2. Tatashi — A popular red pepper found in southeastern Nigerian.

3. Ogige Market — The central market in Nsukka, a town in southeastern Nigeria.

4. Nduo — The Igbo word for sorry.

5. Ka anyi lie nri — Let us eat. It is the Onitsha dialect of the Igbo language.

6. Ke ife owu — What is it?

7. Joor — The Yoruba word for please.

8. Odenigbo — A popular area consisting of a collection of streets in Nsukka.

9. Ifendoli — A sauce of fried palm oil with ugba.

10. Ugba — An Igbo delicacy.

11. Nne — The Igbo word for mother. It’s also used for females generally.

12. Tufiakwa — An exclamation in Igbo forbidding an abomination.

13. Papa Ajasco — A popular Nigerian sitcom.

14. Izozo — A Nigerian soap opera that aired in the early 2000s.

15. Icheoku — A classic Nigerian soap opera that aired in the 1980s.

Ifeanyi Kalu is an emerging Nigerian creative writer born in 1993 and currently lives and works in Enugu state, Nigeria. You can follow him on Twitter @IfeanyiKalu_BOG.